The Translator’s Invisibility

The second experimentalist phase avoided explicit political engagement to develop more speculative projects with distinct philosophical roots (existential phenomenology, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism), exploring the conditions of human consciousness and action in powerfully indeterminate texts. The renewed emphasis on textuality was sometimes given a political inflection in theoretical statements, particularly by members of the first experimentalist phase. In an anthology that surveys Italian poetry during the 1970s, Porta argued that “the reaffirmation of the linguistic force of the I resolves the problem of the interactions between poetry and society, between poetry and reality, because the poetic I is never merely ‘personal’ but, just like the author, is a linguistic-collective event” (Porta 1979:27). In general, however, the post-1968 experimentalism didn’t resort to the left-wing theorizations of the neoavantgarde, but rather pursued the “enamored word,” as the title of one important anthology indicates, turning it into a site of uncontrollable polysemy, exposing and destabilizing the multiple determinations of subjectivity—linguistic, cultural, social (Pontiggia and DiMauro 1978). In doing this, some poets returned to the formal and thematic innovations of hermeticism, its oblique means of signification, its penchant for climactic moments. This is clear in Milo De Angelis’s case: drawing not merely on hermeticism, but on such other European poets as René Char and Paul Celan, he pushes modernist fragmentation to an extreme that threatens intelligibility even while proliferating meaning.

Perhaps a poem by De Angelis, “Lettera da Vignole” (“Letter from Vignole”), can indicate how he at once resembles and differs from the early Montale. It too issues from a friendship between the poet and a woman engaged in literary activity, although not a Dantista. This is Marta Bertamini, who collaborated with De Angelis on the experimentalist magazine he founded, niebo (1977–1984), and on a translation from the Latin (Claudian, The Rape of Proserpine). Vignole is the Italian town near the Austrian border where she was born.

Udimmo la pioggia e quelli
che ritornavano: ogni cosa
nella calma di parlare
{284} e poi la montagna, un attimo, e tutti
i morti che neanche il tuo esilio
potrà distinguere.

“Torna subito o non tornare più.”

Era questa—tra i salmi
della legge—la voce
che hai ripetuto all’inizio,
la potente sillaba, prima
di te stessa. “Solo così ti verrò incontro, ignara
nell’inverno che ho perduto e che trovo.”

(De Angelis l985:12)

We heard the rain and those
who were returning: each thing
in the calm of speaking
and then the mountain, an instant, and all
the dead whom not even your exile
can distinguish.

“Come back at once or don’t ever come back.”

This—amid the psalms
of the law—was the voice
that you repeated at the beginning,
the potent syllable, before
you yourself. “Only then shall I come to meet you, unaware
in the winter which I lost and find.”

Knowing the allusion in the title doesn’t much help to fix the meaning of this poem. The pronouns support multiple subjectivities. A word like “inverno” (“winter”) sets up a fertile intertextual/ intersubjective chain: it suggests a key motif in several poets, notably Celan and Franco Fortini (1917–), an Italian writer of politically engaged cultural criticism and verse who early expressed his admiration of De Angelis. Although De Angelis frequently takes specific episodes in his own life as points of departure, his experimental poetics renders them both impersonal and interpersonal, thickening the representation with an intricate network of images and allusions that construct relations to {285} other poetic discourses, other poetic subjects, challenging any facile reduction of the text to autobiography (whether the poet’s or the reader’s).